Rape of reason

Rising public anger about crimes against women, and the discussion it has sparked about their causes and prevention, is a hugely positive phenomenon. There is, however, a real danger of tokenism in this debate, in place of effective action that makes our streets safer for women.

There are two ways of approaching the topic of rape guaranteed not to bear any fruit. One may be encapsulated as the way of the right, the other as the way of the left. If the goal is a pragmatic one – preventing repeats of incidents such as the Delhi bus rape horror – they offer no solutions and can cause active harm.

One approach is that of Mamata Banerjee, who said that rape cases rise when men and women interact freely. This approach, often favoured by politicians, has many variants. Rape could be attributed to women dressing provocatively. Or to women going out at night, whether to work or play. There can be gender-neutral versions, which blame both women and men for an urbanised lifestyle not in consonance with what politicians preach (but rarely practise) – the ‘Bharat not India’ argument. Protecting women, for example, was part of the rationale advanced by Mumbai police for shutting down parties this New Year’s eve.

Given our aspirational and urbanising society, that is getting closer to realising the constitutional guarantee of equality for women, it’s too late to turn the clock back. And the argument itself is dubious. There’s no evidence that cases of rape, assault and battery are any less in gender-segregated societies such as Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan. The opposite argument is far more plausible – shutting down nightlife would mean having criminals rule the night. And it’s only when men and women get to know each other better that they will understand each other better.

There’s another line of argument more in evidence among activists, to do with ‘commodification’. This one too is a lemming, as there’s no getting away from it in modern society. Commodification is a commodious idea that can embrace almost any human activity. If one enters the job market, for example, one ‘commodifies’ one’s labour. This can hardly be equated to rape.

Commodification, in fact, looks like a repackaged version of the earlier charge of obscenity. Both suffer from the same pitfalls – being woolly, subjective, notoriously hard to pin down and analyse. When obscene representations were banished during the Victorian era, even a piano leg looked sexy to many. And curbing interaction between opposite sexes didn’t prevent the emergence of Jack the Ripper, one of the more notorious sex criminals of all time.

The charge of commodification is also related to a panic around Bollywood item numbers. But if a man (or a woman) enjoys item numbers, that doesn’t make him a rapist (or her complicit in rape). It’s safe to say that even if item numbers were entirely eliminated from movies, it would not make an iota of difference to sex crimes on the street.

Let’s say a woman dresses fashionably. While a right-winger would say she is being provocative, a left-winger would see her as commodifying herself. Neither is making a helpful contribution to the debate on rape. In fact, the radical question that arises is that if society takes women’s freedom seriously, does that not also include her right to be a sex object when she wishes (as well as not to be, when she doesn’t so wish)?

This suggests a distinction that’s far more useful for the debate on rape. Any approach that combats sex crimes by tending to suppress all expressions of sexuality is doomed to fail, if not prove counterproductive. Rather than the capacious idea of commodification, that of consent is a much sharper one to delineate what is permissible. No one should be able to get a woman to do anything without her consent. And sex crimes can be curbed only when law, the authorities and society recognise this right.

Rape of reason

Following daily reports of rape in Haryana, and the suggestions made by some khap leaders on how to stop such crimes, JV went to interview a khap spokesman.

JV: With such incidents taking place every day, Haryana has earned the notorious title of the Rape State of India. What do you say to that?

Khap spokesman: Rape State? Really? I knew that Haryana was the Wheat State of India, growing as it does more wheat than any other state in the country, the claims of that upstart Punjab notwithstanding. But i didn’t know we also produced the most rapeseed for rape oil. You live and learn.

JV: Not rape as in rapeseed for oil. Rape as in sexual assaults on women, which many feel is a worse crime than murder.

KS: Oh, that sort of rape. We don’t call that sort of rape a rape. We call it outraging the modesty of a woman. Which then becomes a matter for an honour killing, because the honour of the entire community has been tarnished by the crime.

JV: You mean an honour killing of the rapist?

KS: No, an honour killing of the victim, who had no business going and getting her modesty outraged in the first place and so bringing badnami to all of us. But not to worry. We’ve been thinking of solutions on how to stop women getting their modesty outraged. Get them married off at 16.

JV: Married at 16? How is that going to stop cases of rape?

KS: Oh, you think 16 is already too much? OK, we can always make it 14. Twelve? Six?

JV: Surely child marriage – or any marriage for that matter – isn’t going to prevent rape. Even married women get raped, no matter how young or old they are.

KS: It is a well-known scientific fact that chowmein – and other fast foods like chowmein, which are becoming only too popular with young people here – have a very bad heating effect upon the system and create a hormonal imbalance in the body. And anything can happen when you have a whole lot of hormonally imbalanced bodies hanging about. Look at China.

JV: China? What’s China got to do with any of this?

KS: China has got everything to do with it. Isn’t China where chowmein comes from? And doesn’t China have the world’s largest population, more even than that of our own Bharat Mata? How much more proof do you need of hormonal imbalance and what it can do? Maybe the next thing we should ban is pizza. You never know with all those home deliveries, and what they might result in.

JV: I don’t think banning fast foods is going to stop rape.

KS: Maybe you’re right again. Maybe what we really need to do is to get to the root of the problem of women getting their modesty outraged. And the root of this problem is obvious: women. If there were no women, no woman could possibly have her modesty outraged, could she?

JV: But women constitute half the population of the country, and they can’t just be wished away.

KS: Oh yes, they can. And in fact they are already being wished away. Not just in Haryana, but all over India. It’s the biggest wishing away since the Holocaust. And it’s called female foeticide.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Author

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, and Second Opinion, which appears on Wednesdays. He also writes the script for three cartoon strips. Two are in collaboration with Ajit Ninan, Like That Only which appears twice a week on Wednesday and Saturday and Power Point which appears on the Edit page of Times of India every Thursday. He also does a joint daily cartoon strip which appears online in collaboration with Partho Sengupta. His blog takes a contrarian view of topical and timeless issues, political, social, economic and speculative.

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, a. . .